What an SF bike protest looked like in 1972

1of5San Francisco bicyclists protest in front of City Hall in 1972. They were seeking a dedicated bike lane on Market Street.Photo: Joe Rosenthal, The Chronicle

2of5Jan. 12, 1972: San Francisco bicyclists protest in front of City Hall, in an early attempt to get government officials to approve a bike lane on Market Street.Photo: Joe Rosenthal / The Chronicle

3of5A woman and a girl stop their bike during a 1972 protest in front of City Hall. The bicyclists were upset about unsafe bicycling conditions on Market Street.Photo: Joe Rosenthal, The Chronicle

4of5San Francisco bicyclists hold up signs during a 1972 protest in front of City Hall. They were seeking a dedicated bike lane on Market Street.Photo: Joe Rosenthal, The Chronicle

5of5San Francisco protest in front of City Hall in 1972. More than 100 bicyclists gathered to protest the biking conditions in downtown San Francisco.Photo: Joe Rosenthal, The Chronicle

There were no mountain bikes, no messenger bags and alarmingly few helmets at the 1972 San Francisco bike protest of City Hall. Most of the 100 or so politically engaged riders were on “Breaking Away”-era 10-speed bicycles.

But the seeds of the movement can be seen, even though the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition was less than a year old. The protesters were a diverse group of San Franciscans, including long-haired young men, older adults who looked like they biked over from the Financial District, and several children. And their message was already solidified, as spelled out in their signs: “Less Cars Not More!” “No Market Street Freeway!” “Safe Bike Lanes on Market!”

The Jan. 12, 1972, photos, discovered just last month, are the first in The San Francisco Chronicle archive featuring a bike protest. They were shot by staff photographer Joseph J. Rosenthal, 27 years after his famous “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima” image.

“Bicycle riders and neighborhood groups demanded yesterday that plans for beautifying Upper Market street be changed to reduce the number of lanes for cars and to provide facilities for bikes,” the story by reporter Jerry Burns began. “Although one young rider nearly collided with a Cadillac on Polk Street, it was a pleasant and untroubled demonstration …”

San Francisco officials seemed less positive about the protest, bluntly dismissing the bikers’ concerns. The primary focus of the protest was for a dedicated bicycle lane on Market Street, which was undergoing a massive makeover for the new BART line.

“We considered bicycle lanes on the sidewalks, but we didn’t like it,” said Jack Barron, head of the city’s Transit Task Force. “We’d rather see a bicycle lane on a median in the middle of the street. There would be some hazards, but no conflicts with pedestrians.”

Bicycle protests in San Francisco date to the 19th century. A huge bicycle parade ended in a riot July 25, 1896, with broken streetcar windows and bonfires in front of City Hall. (Hat tip to the Western Neighborhood Project’s Woody LaBounty, who directed me to Hank Chapot’s excellent essay on the subject at the Found SF site, www.foundsf.org.)

But the environmental awareness in the 1960s, coupled with the proliferation of 10-speed bikes in the following decade, caused a new bicycle boom. The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition emerged in 1971, and The Chronicle’s early 1970s articles read like the newspaper had just discovered that bicyclists exist.

“Thousands of new adult riders are enjoying cycling, sometimes with ecological or political overtones, but more often for health, camaraderie, recreation, economy and transportation,” Fred Kruger wrote in a Feb. 27, 1972, Chronicle article. “… Particularly gratifying is that the cyclist is relatively unencumbered by motor traffic, quite heavy even on weekends in parts of The City.”

Jan. 12, 1972: San Francisco bicyclists hold up signs during a 1972 protest in front of City Hall. They were seeking a dedicated bike lane on Market Street.

Photo: Joe Rosenthal / The Chronicle

Photos of the 1972 protest show a celebratory, optimistic mood among the protesters. There are homemade signs, smiling children and amateur videographers interviewing the bicyclists. The riders mostly stay to the right to make room for motorists, seemingly unaware of the political battles they would be fighting for the next four decades. (In other words, the 1972 scene looks nothing like a 21st century Critical Mass rally.)

Bicycle supporters reading this article have probably already noted that there are still no dedicated bike lanes on Market Street close to the Ferry Building.

A bicyclist from San Francisco holds a sign in front of City Hall during a 1972 protest.

Photo: Joe Rosenthal, The Chronicle

“Oh my,” an S.F. Bicycle Coalition representative posted on Twitter this week, when The Chronicle previewed the 1972 bike protest photos. “We’re still talking about this (45) years later. ONWARD!”

The Chronicle also reported the group’s 1972 demand for a bike lane across the Bay Bridge, another box on the pro-bike coalition wish list that remains unchecked nearly a half century later.

But the protesters succeeded in their demands, working with more welcoming city leaders for neighborhood bike lanes, and bike access to BART and Muni.

A San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency official noted that now there are 152 lane miles of bike lanes in San Francisco — “lane miles” count both sides of the street in some places — including a 3.2-lane mile stretch on Market Street from Castro to Eighth Streets. While The Chronicle reported in 1972 that “about 200 businessmen now cycle to work,” the SFMTA 2015 Bike Count Report estimated 82,000 bike trips in San Francisco each day.

And, perhaps most significantly, the movement endured. More than 44 years later, the voices are even louder, as change continues.

Peter Hartlaub is The San Francisco Chronicle’s pop culture critic and host of the podcast The Big Event. The Bay Area native has worked at The Chronicle since 2000, and was a Chronicle paperboy from 1982 to 1984. He reviews movies, television and comedy, covers entertainment, creates multimedia projects and writes the Our San Francisco local history column. The Big Event is recorded in The Chronicle’s basement archive. Hartlaub lives in Alameda.